Breaking the Waves
by Thyme In Her Eyes
Summary: Amalthea watches the sea...


Breaking the Waves  
  
By Crimson Fuchsia - ariadne@btopenworld.com  
  
Author's Note: Well, this is it - my first fanfic based on Peter S. Beagle's 'The Last Unicorn'. Hopefully not my last. It's been years since I've owned the film and the novel, but it still never ceases to move and inspire me - it's such an enchanting and beautiful tale. But then again, everyone here knows that! Anyway, I just wanted to express my love of 'The Last Unicorn' by writing this story and I hope it does it justice. It centres on the newly transformed Lady Amalthea and her thoughts and feelings surrounding her efforts to adapt to living in a human body, her ever-disappearing memories and the mysteries of the sea. . . Enjoy! And please share any thoughts or feedback!  
  
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Breaking the Waves  
  
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The unicorn no longer lived in a lilac wood but she still lived all alone.  
  
The day is fierce, glittering and grey. The wind and waves run and dash. The atmosphere is heavy with the taste of brief freedom. The sky above is shaded a high, bare blue, rarely interrupted by blank clouds and not even the bleached sun can penetrate the sea today. The magnificent blue-grey sea is veined with opaque ripples of the surging tide and laced with secretive shadows and shades within its depths; shapes the eye can almost make out, but not quite. It rolls forward, taps the shore, almost as if tasting the land with longing and then rolls back, retreating.  
  
She is drawn to it. Something about it calls to her and she forever stands, a solitary figure, looking out towards the sea, her bright eyes deep and searching. All around her there are figures, people, that she could turn to, but in a sense she is still all alone - that, at least, hasn't changed. But everything else has. Everything outside of her and inside of her has changed beyond believing. She is a unicorn no more. Now, she lives a lie and that lie is called Lady Amalthea. She presses her pale hands against cold stone and leans over a little and gazes at the sea below her, wild and beautiful.  
  
It has its own music, its own magic. It sings a mournful melody. It whispers something to her, something she can't understand. She listens to the music of the surge and suck of the water and the dragging tide slipping over the loose shingle, shifting it back and forth. The pure waves advance in tall, majestic ranks, folding over, toppling collapsing into little ruffles of white, leaving just a silver tracery behind; foam lace that soaks quickly into the pebbles of the shore. Its sounds are both peaceful and invigorating to her ears. She is sad.  
  
Of all the lies that ever were, Amalthea is by far and away the loveliest. She possesses a body both delicate and strong, always poised chillingly still and silent. As she stands, her large and intense amethyst eyes fixed on the swell of water beneath, not reflecting the sea but the animals and pure green leaves of her home, her seafoam-white hair flowing carelessly behind her, she looks like a wave about to break. The overture before the breaking. Her poise captures that one moment of perfection before the wave hits, as all waves must, and their cycle begins again. The magic in her eyes is full of the pain of the waves as they strike the lands, sending a white shower of foam and spray flying towards the dark, jagged rocks.  
  
She stands, her motion of her pristine white hair surging in the sea-breeze betraying her to be human and living, rather than a statue. When she moves, still like a shadow on the sea, more gracefully than even a princess is capable of, sorrow and loss follow her as she carries a silent ache of having fumbled around for something precious, only to find it gone. But when she is still and staring, full of longing, as cold and lonely as the starlight, that sorrow becomes the most beautiful, fine emotion in the world, so lovely does it look inside her.  
  
An occasional bird swoops and cries overhead but she doesn't break her gaze. She only looks at the waters, almost as deeply trapped by it as the other unicorns. The light dances for her and the energetic wind blows mist and spray, tiny beads of moisture, onto her clothes and skin.  
  
The tide sweeps forward to greet her, carrying with it the tang of the salt water on the wind. She hears the hushed draw and boom of the waves as they slide closer, drowning a little more of the greyed shore, eroding a little more of Haggard's kingdom while healing an erosion in her own spirit. She wonders, with a sudden yearning, if the sea has a name. Some seas of other lands are given names by the men who dwell beside them and the undying beauty - what of this one? Does this sea have a name? Now that names begin to hold some meaning for her and begin to become an important, necessary part of her thoughts, she feels that a sea as grand as this one should posses a name, that one name should belong to it and its beauty. The waves thrash and subside.  
  
As she looks down towards the brilliant waters, perhaps she sees a glimpse of the magic within for a second, perhaps she sees the unicorn trapped there. Perhaps she sees beyond them, perhaps her gaze is so powerful it sees beyond the purity of her kind and beholds an older, deeper kind of magic folded and hidden inside the waves. She stands, wrapped in her own separate world and sadness, feeling her thought drift in and out of her mind like the constant tide - sweeping in, falling back, only to return again.  
  
Her most constant thought, the one that always returns, is that she was once a unicorn. That thought used to haunt her but now she thinks it only to remind herself. She was a unicorn, long ago. The last unicorn. She was beautiful, pure and ageless. Now she is trapped inside dying flesh and the warm but ever-cooling cage of mortality. She will grow old, she will grow frail and her body and spirit will die. Her magic, the magic that was once a vital part of what she was, what filled her spirit with such shining goodness, has been torn from her body too. There is nothing left of it. Now she must cope with forever feeling the blackness of dying edge ever closer around her and the empty ache where her magic once was. She always mourns that loss, always grieves for the unicorn she once was.  
  
But more and more she finds herself becoming Amalthea. Everything else of her identity slips away, leaving only thin shadows. One moment, she can be clear and sure of everything, a moment later, it could all vanish, leaving her lost and confused.  
  
She realises that the longer she lives this lie, the more she begins to lose the truth. She feels as if a spell is upon her, weaving its perilous magic around her, thinning out her memories of her former life, her former self. Soon, only her eyes will tell the tale of her age. More and more, she is falling deeper under the spell of being the Lady Amalthea. She reminds herself that there's something missing when she looks at herself if all she sees is what her eyes see.  
  
She shuts out the misty forgetfulness and savours everything about the brilliant waters below her. She breathes in the smell of salt, seaweed and fish. She watches the way the curved stretch of water sparkles in the sun, changing from grey to green to dark blue to turquoise. When she watches the sea, she feels free of the whirling of humanity around her. When she watches the sea, she is still and can feel the fading shades of herself return to her. She can almost sense the others nearby, calling out to her.  
  
The night that they first arrived at the crumbling castle, she felt the answers, the magic dwelling in the sea so strongly that she almost saw it. It had called out to her so intensely that she barely noticed the drama unfolding around her. She saw only the sea. Now, it fades a little more each day. Her human senses have sharpened but the part of her that understood the whispers of the waters grows fainter and smaller every day. More and more, she's affected by it but less and less does she understand the sad song she hears.  
  
She is the last. The others need her, she knows. But she feels so weary of searching, so tired of fighting against forgetting. And she's lonely.  
  
She passes a sweeping hand across her forehead, brushing away at ripples of hair to feel the skin beneath. She feels the absence of her horn, gone with only a trace left behind - a small pink mark, shaped like a flower or a star. A faint echo of a unicorn. She shivers, noticing for the first time how cold it is, perched up a high tower, staring out at the sea constantly. She feels the cold and a tiny part of her becomes more human. A fresh pang of yearning is born.  
  
She tried. She knows that she's tried. In the early days of staying at Haggard's castle, she tried so hard to find them, to find the answers. She remembers how she used to linger down the dark halls, like a lonely ghost, looking for even the smallest clue. She is the only one who can find them now. Schmendrick is distracted by having to always conjure - or fail to conjure - magic tricks for King Haggard. Molly is distracted by all the work she has to do. Amalthea knows that they put up with it for her sake, just as she knows that they do it to give her the freedom to look for her kin.  
  
But she's distracted too. Distracted by the sea, distracted by the loss of her memories, distracted by being human. But it's Prince Lír that distracts her the most. Each day he comes to her to try and talk to her, to give her gifts, to give her glorious prizes, to tell heroic tales of his adventures, to recount the great deeds done in her name. He always looks so eager, so earnest. At first she thought that it was deliberate, that he was purposefully distracting her from her quest, perhaps under the command of his father.  
  
She knows better now. But the truth worries her even more, because of the questions they create and the feelings they fan. She wishes that he would give up, that he could stop caring for her the way he does. She wishes that she could tell him that it's as useless as telling the tide not to advance upon the shores. A unicorn can never feel love the same way a human can. A splash of salty spray on her face startles her into a revelation with cold immediacy: she isn't a unicorn any more.  
  
She looks out again at the waters, drawn again to the sea. The surging waters are a sorrowful shade of blue, streaked with lines of grey and shallow purple, lined with rings of white foam. Something white, whiter and purer than the foam and spray rides the waves, running with such sadness on the breaking waves. It's beautiful. But then, the moment it over, the waves break and she wonders if she ever saw something there in the first place.  
  
She wonders what King Haggard sees when he gazes on the sea, when he looks on the dancing, flurrying waves. He looks at it even more often than she does. She wonders what he sees. She wonders if he sees it the same way that she does.  
  
The thought chills her for a reason she can't quite understand. She shrinks and shivers as the waves sprinkle her with stray, cold salt spray. She watches the next line of waves come rolling forward, glittering on the blue horizon, and gently meeting the sky. She is calm. The waves roll, break, and roll again. They shimmer with a mysterious white magic. It gives her joy, hope. The wind becomes chillier and stronger, its gusts carrying more drops of moisture, flecks of sea-surf, against her soft face. She can taste their salt on her lips. The mysterious sea stretches towards the pale horizon - any other world as she knew it was overwhelmed by this great expanse of water.  
  
To her, it seems to have a life of its own. She watches the sea, and a small smile sweeps on her lips. She's overcome by a warm feeling of belonging, enchanted by the watery beauty below her, surging forwards.  
  
She is full of beauty, full of magic, full of mystery. Her snowy skin is cold with foam and sadness. Her bright violet eyes surge with receding tides of memories and certainty. Her brilliant white hair flows behind her, wilder than the waves. She is a unicorn. She is Amalthea.  
  
Beneath her, the waves break.  
  
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THE END  
  
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End file.
